Children make tremendous progress in syntax during the first six years of life. For example, in the first years, they move from two-word sentences to three-word sentences, begin to distinguish between singular and plural forms, and understand negative clauses and various quantifiers. As children develop, they begin to use different grammatical morphemes and form more complex sentences by combining different clauses.
A commonly accepted rule in children's language development is that comprehension precedes production. However, comprehension is often difficult to evaluate because it is advanced, abstract, and extremely individual. Moreover, it is affected by various factors such as context and cognitive concepts, etc.
Therefore, we wanted to empirically investigate the differences between children's comprehension of syntactic structures between the age of four and six.
There were 120 monolingual Slovene-speaking children included in the study; 30 children from each of the following age groups: 4;0-4;5 years, 4;6-4;11 years, 5;0-5;5 years and 5;6-5;11 years.
We found out that there were statistically significant differences between the groups in the understanding of the sentences with in and on, SVO sentences, four-word sentences, and
negative two-words sentences. This suggests that children are making progress in understanding these structures during this period. On the other hand, the results showed no statistically significant differences in the comprehension of affirmative two-word sentences. From the median, we can conclude that children comprehend this structure before the age of four.
There were also no statistically significant differences for the following sentences: sentences with above and under, sentences with ellipses, relative clauses, negation structures with more negation elements, and sentences with object or subject in singular or plural. The reason for this is the complexity of these structures. Since these structures are difficult for children, they need more time to acquire them. We also found that children between the age of 5;6 and 5;11 find it easier to understand the right-branching relative clause than the middle-branching relative clause. Finally, all age groups performed better when confronted with a quantifier all than with most.
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